by Ashley Ream
Something was stuck to the bottom of Harry’s left foot. A lot of somethings. It felt like sand, which wasn’t surprising. People had been out on the beach this week far more than any winter in, it was safe to say, a hundred years. Woo was back to sitting on his padded stool, making notes in Harry’s file, so Harry picked up his foot and brushed the sand off the bottom, feeling some relief that it did turn out to be sand and not some unspeakable thing only found on the floors of hospital exam rooms. When he straightened up, he wiped his hands off on the sides of his gown and caught sight of Woo.
“How did you do that?” Woo’s face was impassive, but his voice had gone up an octave.
Harry tried to be nonchalant. “How did I do what?”
“You balanced on one leg.”
“I was leaning on the table a little,” Harry said.
“No, you weren’t. I was watching.”
“It’s no big deal.”
Woo flipped through some pages in Harry’s file. “Last time I saw you, you had significant loss of mobility in your right arm, hand, leg, and foot. You were dependent on your cane for balance, and when asked to walk the length of the hall, I observed you beginning to drag your right foot. You reported difficulty at the piano and at other fine motor activities involving your fingers.”
Woo looked at Harry for an explanation.
“Some days are better than others. I’m not sure what to tell you.”
Harry was getting frustrated. Was he in trouble for not being a consistent-enough patient? For not continuing to decline right along the little red line on the little chart in one of Woo’s textbooks? So what if he’d managed to help himself? Helping yourself was a good thing. Although the way things were going, maybe that had changed somewhere along the way, too. Maybe you were just supposed to lie around helpless.
Woo opened his mouth, changed his mind, and shut it again. They both sat in silence for a moment. Woo sat. Harry was still standing unassisted. He thought about reaching for his cane but didn’t. There was a clock with too-large numbers on the face above the door and one of those too-loud second hands. It ticked so loudly Harry could imagine it echoing.
“I don’t know what this means, Harry.”
Woo looked like he wanted to take off his glasses and pinch the bridge of his nose, except that Woo had never worn glasses. Instead he put his elbow on the counter with the cotton ball and Q-tip jars and covered his mouth with his palm.
The prickly feeling of discomfort over this whole exam was getting worse and worse. Harry could feel it like stickum burs under his skin. He wanted to get out of there. His clothes were folded up on the rigid little guest chair, and he reached for them.
“I’d like to take some blood samples.”
The last thing Harry wanted was to give a blood sample. He didn’t know what Rachel had given him, but whatever it was was bound to show up floating around with the platelets and cells and whatever else was in blood. Bits from last Tuesday’s sandwich, maybe.
He shook out his pants and stepped into them. This time he really did lean on the table for support before pulling them up under the gown.
“Harry?”
Harry pulled on the gown, and the Velcro gave way with little ripping sounds at each tab. It was like being in some sort of middle-aged, sick-guy version of a striptease.
“No more tests, Woo.”
Harry stood there. The muscles in his arms were sagging. He was skinny, but still his stomach pooched just a little over his pants like maybe he was smuggling a large grapefruit in there, and his pecs had slid down a couple of inches, making the skin look deflated. It was cold. He reached for his T-shirt and his sweater. It was one of his plain gray ones that he liked and had been wearing for years.
“Harry, I’ve never seen anything like this.”
Harry pulled the white T-shirt over his head.
“Your disease—it’s a very difficult one. In all cases, it is progressive.”
Harry pulled his sweater on over the T-shirt. He could feel his hair standing up from the static electricity.
“We administer medications to try to slow the progression, but that’s all we can do.”
Harry dropped into the seat where his clothes had been and reached under his butt to remove the socks he’d just sat on.
“I need you to listen to me, Harry.”
“I am listening.”
Harry wasn’t really listening. He was putting on his socks. It had been several hours since his last dose from Rachel, and while he could still perform the standing magic trick for Woo, he could feel his right hand getting stiff. His symptoms were coming back. That’s all her medicine did. It wasn’t a cure. It was just like Woo had said. But what did it matter? What did it matter if he still had the disease as long as he could control the symptoms?
Harry would tell Rachel about this. He wasn’t selfish. There were others who needed the medication. He knew it probably hadn’t gone through all the trials that such things go through, the approval process, which was horrible and long and littered with the bodies of the waiting. Surely, there were trials, though. Maybe they had already started back at her university. He would ask her to add other patients like him. But he would not rat her out to Woo. He would not say anything, and he would not consent to any tests.
“You are not progressing. You are regressing. You couldn’t do that a month ago.”
“I probably won’t be able to do it tomorrow, Woo. It doesn’t mean anything. Like I said, some days are just easier.”
“That’s the thing.” Woo was so excited that he scooted to the edge of his stool. He was leaning forward and gesturing with both hands. He really did have a sort of immovably plastic face. It was like a Ken doll.
“No one else has good days.” Woo was still talking. “No one I have ever seen. It could be the combination of medications. It could be an environmental factor. It could be you have some sort of mutant form of this thing. Who knows? It could be anything. We must do tests.”
Woo was so beside himself that Harry expected him to pull at his own hair. Maybe he was. Harry was doing his best not to look at his old friend. Instead, he concentrated on smoothing out the bottom of his sock, so it wouldn’t crumple up inside his shoe. He had taken to wearing Velcro sneakers like the ones they give to toddlers. He had to special order them off the Internet. How would he function without Velcro? It seemed to be holding his life together these days.
When he got like this, all turned to the inside, Tilda thought he wasn’t listening, that he had gone away to some other secret place that only he knew about. If there were people who could do that, he wanted to meet them and learn their secrets. When Harry did it, he was trying to pull into a turtle shell he didn’t have. So instead he just rolled up like an armadillo and hoped whatever onslaught was happening would pass. He hadn’t gone anywhere any more than a child goes somewhere when he covers his eyes and insists, “I can’t see you,” to make you go away.
“No more tests, Woo.” Harry stood up and reached for his cane. “Like I said, it’ll be back the way it was tomorrow.”
Woo did not follow him into the hallway, which suited Harry as much as it surprised him. He needed to get going. He needed to collect Tilda. It was time to go home.
29.
“Goddammit,” Rachel said to herself and then louder to the person knocking on her door, “Just a minute!”
Rachel went back to grinding another dose for herself. She had bandages on both arms from the cuts she’d been testing. She had taken a dose within the hour, just after coming home from the hardware store. That dose had been ground from the flash-frozen specimens, but the active compound had decayed. She experienced a mild analgesic effect, reducing her pain from a four to a two-point-five out of five. Not enough. Not nearly enough. The specimens needed to be fresh to be effective.
Rachel’s doorknob rattled but did not give. The old one was in the trash can, along with the plastic bag and receipt. The new doorknob she had installed herself. The new ke
y was already on her key chain. No one could get in now. No one.
There was a pause, and then the rattling started up again.
“I said ‘Just a minute!’”
Rachel finished grinding and then used a plastic spoon to scrape up the dose, a little larger than before. She had learned to swallow the whole thing in a ball without smearing it all over the inside of her mouth. It did a lot for the taste. Once it was down, she shook her head to center herself and pulled the sleeves of her shirt down over her bandages.
“Who is it?” she called, wishing she had a peephole.
“It’s me.”
“Mr. Streatfield?” Rachel unlocked the door, opened it just enough, and then pushed her head out into the hall. She was holding on to the knob from the inside and had her foot jammed up against the bottom of the door. It would be nearly impossible for someone to push their way in. Someone like John. He could be anywhere. You couldn’t know.
“You put a lock on the door?” Harry asked.
Rachel didn’t answer him. Obviously she had, and obviously it was necessary. He had just tried to barge in without permission. There was no one in the house or outside of it who didn’t want to get at her equipment and specimens.
“Do you need something?” Rachel asked.
“The medicine you gave me is wearing off.”
“That’s to be expected.”
“I need some more,” he said.
“The supply is very limited. I’m sorry.”
Harry wrapped his hand around the door just under Rachel’s chin to keep her from shutting it. It was getting harder to control her temper. If he wasn’t careful, she would have to slam it closed on his fingers.
“It’s very important,” he said. “I think this may be bigger than you realize.”
It took a large number of the creatures to make each dose, and secreting them away remained difficult. Between what Rachel needed in the tanks and what she was taking herself, there wasn’t much to share, at least not yet.
“I can’t risk diluting my experiments,” she said.
“You don’t understand. I’ve just come from the doctor, and I have results to report.”
He had her attention, and she wanted to go fetch her notebook, write down what he said word for word—word for word in her own code, of course. There was nothing left in English. Not that she needed the notes. She’d memorized them. All of them. That she could memorize them—not just the narrative accounts, that was easy—but she had memorized the temperature readings, nutrient ratios, and animal densities of each and every flask, not to mention times, dosages, experimental conditions. Hundreds of numbers.
Everything just stuck. It was like she’d been struck with sudden-onset eidetic memory. It was incredible. She had noted that, too, in her log. Its potential as a memory and concentration aid beyond even analgesics was more than she could wrap her mind around at the moment. Students with ADHD? Dementia patients? Alzheimer’s? This drug seemed to touch every part of the nervous system and the brain itself. She would not risk Harry seeing her notebook, not even in code. She would memorize what he said to her. She took a deep breath through her nose and readied her mind to do it.
“Tell me,” Rachel said.
Harry shook his head. “Trade.”
“One more dose,” Rachel said.
“No. I want to be in your trial. I want to be a study patient.”
Trial? Rachel reeled. Did Harry believe this was official? Something overseen by the university? Something that would make it all the way to the human trial phase? Rachel wanted to laugh. She supposed it was. She had simply skipped over everything in between. It was the chemistry equivalent of flying a kite in an electrical storm.
Rachel had to word this carefully. “I’ll give you the doses I can for as long as I can, but that’s the best I can offer.”
She could see the tension in the left side of Harry’s body. He was leaning on his cane, and the fingers of his right hand, those still wrapped around the door, were curling in on themselves. She didn’t have to worry about him trying to push in. She didn’t even need her foot blocking the door. He had little strength or dexterity left in that side at all.
Harry pulled his eyebrows down and together. He looked like he was chewing on the inside of his mouth. It wasn’t what he wanted to hear.
“What I learned today,” he said, “it has implications. More people like me need to be studied. They need to test this drug.”
“I know,” Rachel said. “People with all sorts of conditions could be helped, but there are processes.”
“Whatever the steps are, you promise you will include us?” he asked.
“When there is enough of the drug, yes,” Rachel said.
“And I will be one of those people? I’ll get the doses you have now, and then I’ll be in the trial later?”
Harry did not understand. It would be years before a trial would happen through official channels. Of course, years in chemistry was nothing. It was normal. It was unavoidable. Years to people, though, that was different. Harry did not have years. It was sad, but it was unchangeable. She started to explain, to put the words together in her mind, and then she stopped. Why not make the promise? She would know, but he wouldn’t. In the end, what difference would it make but to work out better for the both of them?
Rachel started again. Yes, he would be in the trial. Yes, he could keep seeing his own doctor—Woo, was it?—during the study. Yes, as long as he saw the study doctors, too. She said yes to everything he asked because there was no reason not to.
After he had extracted his promises, Rachel asked for one of her own. He must take careful note of all the side effects and all the symptom relief he experienced. Careful note. She said it again. Times, effects on a scale of one to five, descriptions of everything, what he ate and drank and when. Anything he could think of. But he must not type it and save copies. He could only write these things down, and he must keep the notes on him at all times. He must not let anyone else see them. No one. Not even Tilda. Then he would give the notes to her in the morning. He would not keep a copy for himself.
He agreed. Rachel wanted to make him swear on his mother’s grave, on scout’s honor, on a bible, but she didn’t. She took him on his word because she believed he would not risk being cut off.
She left him in the hallway while she ducked back inside and used what was left in the flasks to mix up another dose. It was a little more than she’d given him last time. She weighed it on her scale and made her own notes. It was a little more than a little more. It was one-and-a-half times as much. It would be good to note the difference in his symptoms and duration of relief.
Harry took the spoon from her at the door, swallowed it with a face, and handed it back. “You’re going to be a very wealthy woman, you know.”
Rachel did not reply. It wasn’t that she didn’t understand the monetary value others would place on what she had. It was that, to her, the money was entirely beside the point. She was there to save her own life, and there were only two days left to do it.
* * *
Epoxy is a mixture of resin and hardener, which are sold in separate containers to keep them from combusting. The two had to be mixed in a precise ratio, which cured through an endothermic reaction, meaning it gave off heat, sometimes a lot, sometimes, if you weren’t careful, enough to boil and catch fire. The clerk, a man of retiring age, at the marine supply store had warned Tilda to be careful of the vapors. In enclosed spaces, they had been known to cause brain damage and blindness.
If it had been a sales pitch, it had worked. She threw a mask and goggles into her cart, along with a shallow pan for mixing small batches of the stuff, thick gloves, and a stiff brush for applying it, some sail tape and various other odds and ends that had seemed useful at the time. The total for not a lot of things had been staggering.
Tilda, who was wearing the grubbiest clothes she’d brought, pulled on her headlamp and gloves, along with the mask and goggles, and got to work th
ere under the deck. Making sure each area of rot was clean and dry, she mixed the resin and hardener, along with a tint to help hide the patches as best she could. The concoction immediately let off a stench that shot through the mask and into her nose, a caustic, chemical smell that burned her nasal passages and set off a headache as quickly as lighting a match.
Hurrying, both because it would harden on her and because she wanted to get the job done before her vision started to go, she began to apply the epoxy, pressing, filling, and smoothing each area. She had decided to buy the quart rather than the gallon, and by the time she’d moved to the hiking boards, she was beginning to worry it wouldn’t be enough.
When she was done, she pulled off the protective gear and wrapped up the disposable pan and brush, which would never be good for anything again. Wanting to get as far away from the stuff as she could while it cured, she grabbed the sail bag and dragged it to the other side of the deck.
It would take twenty-four hours for the epoxy to harden but far less than that to see what horrors might await within the many yards of fabric in front of her. Unlike bigger sailboats, Serendipity had no supplementary motor. It was wind or nothing.
Tilda unzipped the bag and began pulling out handfuls of sail. It had been shoved inside, not folded neatly. Some mariners would argue this was better, that repeated fold lines would weaken the cloth. Tilda considered this an excuse for laziness.
This section of decking was only about seven feet high, plenty high enough to work, but she found herself ducking as she spread the fabric out. It was covered in salt and dirt, was of indeterminate age, and needed, on principle, to be replaced. But when Tilda got down on her hands and knees to run her headlamp over it inch by inch, she found only two small tears.
She scrambled up and went to fill her bucket at the outdoor spigot. Adding a good squirt of dish soap, which sank down into the water like a skinny turquoise snake, Tilda plunged the brush into the water up to her forearm and sloshed it about before she had time to think about how cold it was. Working from top to bottom, Tilda scrubbed the sail, drying it with an old bath towel as best she could, before flipping it over and doing the other side. Then, careful to clear all the grains of sand from around each tear, she unwrapped the sail tape. Using a bit more than the directions called for, she finally finished and stood, running her lamp over each spot one last time. White tape on white sail, the repairs barely showed.
